Automatic height estimation using the second subglottal resonance

This paper presents an algorithm for automatically estimating speaker height. It is based on: (1) a recently-proposed model of the subglottal system that explains the inverse relation observed between subglottal resonances and height, and (2) an improved version of our previous algorithm for automatically estimating the second subglottal resonance (Sg2). The improved Sg2 estimation algorithm was trained and evaluated on recently-collected data from 30 and 20 adult speakers, respectively. Sg2 estimation error was found to reduce by 29%, on average, as compared to the previous algorithm. The height estimation algorithm, employing the inverse relation between Sg2 and height, was trained on data from the above-mentioned 50 adults. It was evaluated on 563 adult speakers in the TIMIT corpus, and the mean absolute height estimation error was found to be less than 5.6cm.